For the first time, Ronald Poppo can be heard describing the day a naked North Miami man attacked him and chewed off most of his face -- and then thanking police for saving his life.

“He just ripped me to ribbons," the 65-year-old calmly told police on interview recordings obtained by CBS Miami. "He chewed up my face. He plucked out my eyes... And basically that’s all there is to say about it.”

Poppo said Eugene, whom he did not recall having ever met before, approached him on the sidewalk and was "chummy" before he "snapped," strangling him in "wrestling holds" and picking at Poppo's eyes.

“For a very short amount of time I thought he was a good guy,” Poppo said in the interview, which was conducted July 19. “But he just went and turned berserk. He apparently didn’t have a good day at the Beach and he -– he was coming back. And I guess he took it out -- took it out on me -- or something. I don’t know.”

Poppo indicated that he also thought Eugene was on drugs: "He was talking kind of funny talk for a while too...That I was gonna die. And he was gonna die. He must have been souped up on something. He -- he had some kind [of] desperate preoccupation of that type.”

At another point in the interview, Poppo said Eugene told him he didn't enjoy his morning on Miami Beach because "he said he wasn’t scoring there, or something. He went to the Beach to score, or something. He is in...kind of...flustered mode about it."

Several inconsistencies suggest Poppo may be slightly confused about the attack. He told police that Eugene exited a car before the attack and was wearing pants; video shows Eugene approach the off ramp on foot and completely naked, which was also confirmed by 911 callers. Later, he sourced "telepathy" while telling police he thought Eugene was a drug dealer.

“I asked [the social worker] if he wants to talk to me, and she said, ‘He talks about you all the time.’ I said, ‘Really?’ ” Antoinette Poppo told the Herald. “He asked me how the family was. He wants to know if I’m ever going to move to Florida. He said he’d like to see me. I would love to see him, but I have Parkinson’s.”

“I thank the Miami Police Department for saving my life," the "extremely charming" patient told detectives before concluding the interview. "That’s about the best I could sum it up as. If they didn’t get there in a nick of time, I would’ve definitely been in worse shape. Possibly I’d be DOA."